Al***s ruined by poor production?
Posted by: ejl on 27 April 2002
Re-listening to "Baptism" by Joan Baez recently made me realize how lousy production/engineering can damage the work of even the most determined and talented musician. The production on this album is really dreadful; bright, hard string and wind sounds, sloppy and premature cuts between tracks, uneven recording levels among tracks, and so forth.
A pity; get past the stridency of the opening tracks and there is some really striking work trying to get out. This album was largely dismissed for reasons that may have been outside of Baez's control. I wonder what others might fit in this category?
Posted on: 27 April 2002 by JohnS
I may be alone in thinking that this is a classic pop album (that's "Blondie", everybodes) but my German vinyl pressing was excellent. The CD version sucks donkey balls. OK, OK, probably not poor production but definitely poor mastering
-John
Posted on: 28 April 2002 by Former member
Parallel Lines
Haven't heard the CD, but the album's pretty fab - if I'm feeling in a Blondie mood then this is the one I turn to. "Hanging On The Telephone" was the first track I heard on an LP12, so in my mind it always sounds astonishing!
My nominations:
Initiation - Todd Rundgren
Though the re-mastered CD is the best I've heard it sound, the EQ and compression on this are awful. Which is a shame, because side one in particular has some excellent songs on it and "A Treatise On Cosmic Fire" has its' moments that would be better if it weren't so astringently produced.
Back in the 70's we even tried to feed the signal through a DBX box to see if we could un-compress it. Didn't work!
Back In The USA - MC5
Whilst strictly speaking this is still a great album (and not ruined by bad production per se) it would have been nice to hear this not sounding as though it was coming from a tiny transistor radio!
Posted on: 28 April 2002 by Cheese
The absolutely worst-sounding album of all time. Some call it "a revolutionary album". I don't. Urgh !
Cheese
Posted on: 28 April 2002 by David Dever
Keep in mind that "production" does, to a large extent, also include coaxing the best performance possible out of the musicians.
Sometimes this might include blaring a huge PA in a big room while recording drum parts (Craig Leon on the Ramones records), compressing the **** out of the monitor mix to force the band to play louder and more aggressively in tone, or, simply, flexing against the limitations of a recording budget (and tape machine track counts) at a time when no one thought that rock-n-roll would ever take off, especially on Verve!
Recording is not exclusively about audiophile sound quality, I'm sorry to say, though it seems that the best systems seem to extract the music out without problems...
Dave Dever
P.S. The Velvets always sounded good on decent Euro vinyl, esp. WLWH.
[This message was edited by David Dever on SUNDAY 28 April 2002 at 19:07.]
